WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) – The Environmental Protection
Agency said on Tuesday that it may ease an interim deadline for
states to meet tougher carbon emission standards after
regulators and electric utilities complained a lack of time may
destabilize electricity supplies.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told an audience of state
utility regulators meeting in Washington that she was giving
them a “big hint” the agency may loosen the interim targets set
in its proposed rule for existing power plants, under which each
state would need to show an assigned average emission reduction
between 2020 and 2029.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government’s move to suspend a trouble-plagued $1.65 billion carbon capture and storage (CCS) project this month may have bolstered legal challenges to proposed environmental regulations on power plant carbon emissions, several legal experts said.

The FutureGen project in Illinois would have been the first U.S. commercial-scale, near-zero emission coal plant to use technologies to capture carbon dioxide from major industrial plants and store it safely underground. This approach could sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions and curb global warming.